How do I link from the author name in the info section, to an author box? A good example of this is Problogger,net – when you follow the link of “darren rows”, an author box appears at the top of the post.

@brian – I must be doing something wrong. I did check those boxes, but when I link on my name in the post info section, it goes to my home page? Here’s the page with the link Mom Goes Online. How do I get it to go to an author box?

That sounds like a good idea. If it is possible, I would prefer to have my name link to something, as I personally like to be able to follow such a link when I enjoy an article and want to know a bit more about the author (so I assume others might too).

Is it possible to maybe redirect the link to my about page? Or does that require advanced coding skills (which I absolutely do not have by any stretch of the imagination!!!)

I disabled the author archives, as I thought it would create duplicate content on my website since I am the only author. However, from clicking around on other websites, I get the impression that the author archives is a page with an author box, and a list of recent posts by that author.

Is the duplicate content relating to the fact that that page might resemble the home page of a blog, if the home page contains a list of the most recent posts, and it is a one author blog?

THe reason why I am asking is because I have the magazine theme, so my front page will not simply be a list of my most recent posts, but rather a set of featured posts by category. In which case, if my question above is correct, there is no risk of duplicate content?

The risk of duplicate content arises when an archive is marked to be indexed by search engines. If your author archive (or any archive) is marked noindex (which is easy to do in WordPress SEO), you’ll be fine.

Yoast talks about the chance that someone else will link to this (or any) archive if they are reachable from your site, but that’s a small risk. Most people don’t disable category or tag archives despite this small risk, because those archives benefit users. If having an author archive might benefit your readers, it’s fine to have one as long as it’s marked noindex.

Let me clarify my use of “risk”. There is a small risk that someone will link to an author archive because the link to the archive is usually smaller than the link to a post and most people that go to the trouble of linking to something want to link to great content (ie, a page/post) as opposed to an archive of them. In other words, it makes more sense for someone to make a link that says “laura said this interesting thing here” (ie, a link to a post) as opposed to “here’s a collection of interesting things laura said” (the author archive link). But whenever you include something that is linkable on your site, you can’t control how others will link to it.

Links to author archives (or to any archive for that matter) are bad for 2 reasons. First, keep in mind that sites don’t rank, pages/URL’s do. Rank in part comes from links. So when someone links to an archive, they aren’t linking to the content for which you are trying to rank (a page or post), so the link you get isn’t as helpful as one that links to the right content. Second, links to archives are bad from a usability standpoint. Archives change as new content is added. If I look at 1 of your archives today and see a post on “blue widgets” and link to the archive because my readers want info on blue widgets, at some point there’s a decent chance whatever you wrote about blue widgets moves to a new page in the archive. Visitors arrive expecting content about blue widgets, which months and years later could be on page 22 of your archive. Those visitors leave disappointed and feeling misled, that they were promised content about blue widgets and found none. We’ve all had the experience of clicking a link in a SERP expecting to find something and being disappointed; most of those situations are links to archives that should have been tagged noindex to begin with.

@bill – thank you so much for explaining complex things in a way I can understand! (I am really impressed by your knowledge). Since I am a one author blog, I think it is wiser to just not have a link from post info to archives (I have had situations where I followed a link only to end up on author archives and not be able to find the article I was expecting). I am also thinking it is wiser not to link to my about page, as I heard about this thing called link-juice, and I am not looking to rank on my about page.

I know you are very knowledgeable on the WordPress SEO plugin: does Yoast automatically do a nofollow for comments and about / contact pages? or is that a setting we need to set ourselves?

You also mentioned in another thread that you were writing an article on why it is good to use yoast’s plugin on genesis – I’d be interested to read it so let me know when you publish it!

@brian – I followed your instructions to unlink my name in the post info – it worked, thank you!

@laura – You’re welcome. I wouldn’t worry about linking to your about page or even link juice. Recent updates in search algorithms by Google hit sites that had artificial link approaches (e. g., always using the same keyword rich anchor text to link to something). For example, if your about page contains a unique description of you and is part of how you present your site or your business, your about page should be tagged index and should be linked to throughout your site. For example, RE agents or lawyers often have about pages that are a big part of their presentations, and that’s the kind of content you want in a search index.

As for nofollowing comments, that’s something that WP itself does from many versions ago. WordPress SEO doesn’t automatically nofollow about/contact pages, because it doesn’t know WHICH pages are these pages among all of your WP pages. It can nofollow ALL of your pages (see SEO->Titles & Metas->Post Types), but that’s not something that most people should do. Keep in mind that it is easier for a page to build rank and keep it compared to a post because pages are seen as more durable and less time sensitive. A common example given is content on the death of Michael Jackson. A post immediately at the time of his death can get a high rank because Google seems to assign some “news” element in its post ranking, but the rank fades as the news becomes old. A page on the life of Michael Jackson can have more enduring rank qualities. Therefore, you may set some of your pages to noindex, nofollow (e. g., terms of service page, privacy policy page), but your most valuable, best ranked content will often come from pages.